Ex-Ambassadors Lament U.N. Bashing / World body called crucial to U.S. policy

Edward Epstein, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, June 21, 1995

Four former American ambassadors to the United Nations defended the organization yesterday as an irreplaceable instrument of U.S. foreign policy.

Speaking at a forum at Herbst Theatre as part of the United Nations' 50th birthday party, the four decried the tide of U.N.-bashing in Congress and elsewhere in the country.

"Supporting the United Nations is not politically correct," said Vernon Walters, whose career in diplomacy goes back to the 1940s. A former deputy CIA director, he was U.N. ambassador in President Ronald Reagan's second term. "The politicians are thinking of elections."

"The U.N. is the least worst organization around to deal with the peaceful settlement of dispute," said Thomas Pickering, the U.N. envoy under President George Bush who is now ambassador to Russia.

"There is plenty of room for improvement" in the United Nations, he added. "But our future is increasingly tied in with the rest of the world. We are going to have to be a leader of the world, and the U.N. is part of that."

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American financial support for U.N. peacekeeping is under attack in the Republican Congress, but the Clinton administration has not often been outspoken in support of the United Nations.

"There does not seem to be any figure in the United States government who is providing a vision for the U.N.," said Donald McHenry, ambassador under President Jimmy Carter.

Part of the problem may be that in the post-Cold War world, the United Nations has found itself drawn into intractable, high-profile civil wars in places such as Somalia and Bosnia.

All four ambassadors said the United Nations is not mainly to blame for the mess in Bosnia. Instead, the situation reflects the refusal by major powers to commit themselves to use force to enforce peace. And that, in turn, reflects the fact that the United Nations represents nothing more than the collective will of its members.

"It is rather frustrating to see the inability of the U.N. to deal with Bosnia. There has been no definition of what the U.N. should perform in Bosnia," said Edward Perkins, who also was an ambassador under Bush. Tasks have been added to its mission by the Security Council as the war has festered, he said.

To McHenry, the post-Cold War world shows the need for the United Nations to develop a multinational rapid deployment force that could be sent into threatening situations before they explode into war. The others were not so sure of that idea.

It was Walters who was most emphatic in saying that the world is making a tragic mistake in letting the Bosnian war drag on.

"To me, Bosnia is the reoccupation of the Rhineland by the Nazis," he said referring to Adolf Hitler's 1936 decision to send his weak army to occupy land barred to him under the Versailles Treaty. France failed to react, further emboldening Hitler.

"If we don't do something much more serious in Bosnia, it will spread to involve Greece, Bulgaria and all of the Balkans. We should intervene massively," said Walters.